Koran Required Reading. The University
of North Carolina--Chapel Hill is requiring all incoming freshmen to read
a book titled Approaching the Qur'an:The Early Revelations by
Michael Sells. The book takes selected passages that Muslims believe are
the earliest revelations received by the prophet Mohammed from God and promotes
them. TV talk show host Bill O'Reilly compared this to requiring the reading
of Mein Kampf by Adolph Hitler in 1941. The thing that is rather incredible
about this development is that over the past 20 years nearly all state universities
(including UNC) have opposed the teaching of the Bible on campus. Comparative
religion classes were said to be enough, and these classes were mostly destructive
critiques of the Bible. The problem with this book is that it ignores commands
in the Koran that justify killing people who disagree with Mohammed's claims,
and focuses on the positive teachings which the Koran presents. We would
suggest if one is going to enlighten people about the teachings of the Koran,
that the whole book needs to be examined, including those passages that bin
Laden and his ilk are using to justify September 11.

Tool Use Definition in Trouble Again.
Over the 35 years that we have been engaged in this program of work, we
have seen the question of tool use become more and more of a problem for
archaeologists and anthropologists. There was a time when tool use was considered
to be peculiar to man, and then Jane Goodall lived with the chimpanzees and
saw that they also used tools. We now know that tool use is also present
in some birds. On August 9, 2002, in USA Today, page 2A, there was
an article that brought a new issue to the forefront. No one had ever seen
a bird make a tool. What had been seen were birds using sticks to get insects
out of holes in trees, and carrying rocks to drop on other birds eggs to
break them. A new study at the Behavioral Ecology Research group at Oxford
has reported that crows can actually make tools. What the researchers did
was put some food at the bottom of a tube. They then gave crows some straight
wires and some wires that had a hook at the end to snag the food. When
no wires with hooks on the end were available, the crows would take a straight
wire and bend it with their beaks to produce a hook like the ones they had
been using. Clearly the ability to make tools is not a valid defining characteristic
of the ancestors of man. The Bible says nothing about this controversy,
and defines man in terms of his spiritual make-up in the image of God. It
is obvious that brain size and the ability to do things with tools are inferior
criteria to define man.

Judges 9 and Watermelons.
It is interesting to see the lengths that people will go to as they attempt
to discredit the Bible. Also interesting is how believers find ways to respond.
Over the past several years, there have been scholars who have suggested
that Judges
9:50-57 could not possibly be true. The passage says that a woman in
Thebez was standing on top of a tower and threw an "upper millstone" that
crushed the head of Abimelech. Skeptics have said that a woman would not
have the strength to lug a millstone to the top of a tower to throw it.
Two professors have researched this problem. The two women--Denise Herr
and Mary Boyd first showed that there are three types of millstones. Lower
millstones weighed some 300 pounds and obviously were not used. Upper millstones
came in 27-pound varieties, and there was a home-sized stone that weighed
nine pounds. Deuteronomy
24:6 makes reference to such stones. What Herr and Boyd did was to carry
the stone up and throw it at a watermelon to show that the biblical account
was indeed very possible for a woman to do. I would add that there are some
women who are strong enough to out-lift any man in a project like this, and
the Bible does seem to indicate that this was an exceptional woman. Herr
and Boyd point out that this situation is an "all-too-typical example of
biblical scholars endorsing skepticism without knowing enough archaeology."

-Reference: AP Release by Richard Ostling, July 18, 2002.

More Cloning Problems. The media
tends to carry on quite a bit when a new animal is cloned. We now have cloned
sheep, cows, mice, goats, pigs, a cat, and rabbits--all of these have made
the television news broadcasts and newspapers. What has not made the news
media is the fact that only 1 in 100 cloned embryos develops normally in
the womb, and that many of these die immediately after birth. Those who
do survive have problems with obesity, liver failure, joint problems, and
many other malfunctions. New studies indicate that this is happening because
of malfunctioning genes. Research at the University of Connecticut at Storrs
has shown that the cloning process apparently fails to reprogram the donor
cell nucleus to act like that of an ordinarily-fertilized egg. At the University
of Pennsylvania, studies have shown that over 90% of cloned mouse embryos
have a critical gene called Oct4 which is misplaced or malfunctions.
It is looking more and more like cloning may be incredibly harder to do
than anyone visualized when the first successes were reported.

--Reference: Discover, August 2002, page 11.

New Theory on Exodus. One of the
areas where skeptics like to point fingers at the Bible is on the story of
the Israelites' Exodus from Egypt. Many scholars have pointed out that there
is no record of the Israelites being held as slaves in Egypt and no evidence
of the crossing of the Red Sea. It is no surprise that the Egyptians would
not tell us about the Israelites. We do not hear much about Viet Nam from
the government in the United States. Things that are an unpleasant part
of your history you do not do a lot of talking about--for better or for worse.
The question of a lack of evidence for the crossing of the Red Sea is another
matter. A new documentary titled The Exodus Revealed is now available
offering some new ideas about the Exodus. Swedish archaeologist Lennart Moller
has been doing research in the Red Sea Gulf of Aqaba, and it is his work
that this new documentary is based on. Your local Christian bookstore can
get a copy for you.

Chimpanzee Wife Beaters. One of
the questions that always comes up when one considers the origin of man is
the question of where violence comes from. Over the years, atheists have
suggested that religion is the cause of war and violence in mankind. John
Lennon's famous song Imagine summarized the view when he said in his
lyric "Imagine there is no Heaven.nothing to kill or die for.and no religion
too." Many writers have pointed out that animals use violence for brief
times in securing mates, eating prey, and marking off territory; but that
over all within their group there is no violence. Man, on the other hand,
has wars and strife that are over things that animals could care less about,
and which have nothing to do with survival. The idea is that these struggles
of man are over religious and political control issues; and without religion
and politics, the world would be a better place in which to live. A book
titled The Octopus and the Orangutan by Eugene Linden and followup
studies to its content have changed this picture. Researchers have now seen
chimpanzees using clubs to bring pain to one another in a situation that
does not have anything to do with mating or territory. The chimps bringing
the pain use clubs in such a way that they hurt, but do not bring permanent
injury--such as holding the club half way up its length. Chimps are capable
of killing one another by biting or throwing rocks, and these behaviors have
been seen in the old. This is a more restrained action obviously designed
to hurt other chimps--usually of the opposite sex--but not to kill; or injure
them. This study follows on another study several months ago that documented
rape in the chimpanzee community.

Some researchers have suggested that chimps saw people doing this and
copied what the humans did, but there has not been that much contact between
the chimps being studied and humans. What it shows is that violence and mistreatment
have nothing to do with religion, but are a part of the natural world. Whether
this happens in all animal groupings or not remains to be seen, but it is
a new find that will have significant impact on our understandings of behavior
in the animal kingdom.

--Reference: Time, August 19, 2002, page
56-57.

Sahelanthropus tchadensis. In the
ongoing research on hominoid evolution, new finds seem to come about on a
monthly basis. The name in our title translates as Sahel hominoid from Chad
and is claimed to be seven million years old. What excites anthropologists
is that the specimen shows some characteristics that seem to be human and
some that seem to be apelike. Time magazine titled their article
on the find as "Father of Us All." Newsweek titled theirs "All in
the Family." First of all, we need to understand that what has been found
is a skull. The snout does not protrude as much as a chimp, the canines
are shorter than a chimp, and the eyebrow ridge is more man-like than it
is chimp-like. What the media has not emphasized is that the brain is chimp-sized
and that whether it could walk erect or not cannot be answered. This new
skull really complicates all human theories about hominoid evolution, but
it also may be an oddity and not typical of the ape forms that lived at the
time.

We would like to point out that as has been the case in the past, this
new find is not of biblical consequence. The Bible defines man in terms
of his having been created in the image of God. It is man's spiritual makeup
that defines man, not what his physical body looks like or what characteristics
his ancestors might have had. Certain anthropological theories may be proven
or disproven by continued research into this specimen, but it has no consequences
for the biblical account.